The World According to Garp

They were not so comforting when they came.

“Break your mother's heart,” said one.

“If you'd only stayed at Wellesley,” said the other.

“A girl alone has to protect herself,” Jenny said. “What could be more proper?”

But one of her brothers asked her if she could prove that she had not had previous relations with the man.

“Confidentially,” whispered the other one, “have you been dating this guy long?”

Finally, things were cleared up when the police discovered that the soldier was from New York, where he had a wife and child. He had taken a leave in Boston and, more than anything else, he feared the story would get back to his wife. Everyone seemed to agree that would be awful—for everyone—so Jenny was released without charges. When she made a fuss that the police had not given her back her scalpel, one of her brothers said, “For God's sake, Jennifer, you can steal another one, can't you?”

“I didn't steal it,” Jenny said.

“You should have some friends,” a brother told her. “At Wellesley,” they repeated.

“Thank you for coming when I called you,” Jenny said.

“What's a family for?” one said.

“Blood runs thick,” said the other. Then he paled, embarrassed at the association—her uniform was so besmirched.

“I'm a good girl,” Jenny told them.

“Jennifer,” said the older one, and her life's earliest model—for wisdom, for all that was right. He was rather solemn. He said, “It's best not to get involved with married men.”

“We won't tell Mother,” the other one said.

“And certainly not Father!” said the first. In an awkward attempt at some natural warmth, he winked at her —a gesture that contorted his face and for a moment convinced Jenny that her life's earliest model had developed a facial tic.

Beside the brothers was a mailbox with a poster of Uncle Sam. A tiny soldier, all in brown, was climbing down from Uncle Sam's big hands. The soldier was going to land on a map of Europe. The words under the poster said: SUPPORT OUR BOYS! Jenny's oldest brother looked at Jenny looking at the poster.

“And don't get involved with soldiers,” he added, though in a very few months he would be a soldier himself. He would be one of the soldiers who wouldn't come home from the war. He would break his mother's heart, an act he once spoke of with distaste.

Jenny's only other brother would be killed in a sailboat accident long after the war was over. He would be drowned several miles offshore from the Fields' family estate at Dog's Head Harbor. Of his grieving wife, Jenny's mother would say, “She's still young and attractive, and the children aren't obnoxious. At least not yet. After a decent time, I'm sure she'll be able to find someone else.” It was to Jenny that her brother's widow eventually spoke, almost a year after the drowning. She asked Jenny if she thought a “decent time” had passed and she could begin whatever had to be begun “to find someone else.” She was anxious about offending Jenny's mother. She wondered if Jenny thought it would be all right to emerge from mourning.

“If you don't feel like mourning, what are you mourning for?” Jenny asked her. In her autobiography, Jenny wrote: “That poor woman needed to be told what to feel.”

“That was the stupidest woman my mother said she ever met,” Garp wrote. “And she had gone to Wellesley.”

But Jenny Fields, when she said good-night to her brothers at her small rooming house near Boston Mercy, was too confused to be properly outraged. She was also sore—her ear, where the soldier had cuffed her, hurt her; and there was a deep muscle cramp between her shoulder blades, which made it hard for her to sleep. She thought she must have wrenched something in there when the theater lackeys had grabbed her in the lobby and pulled her arms behind her back. She remembered that hot-water bottles were supposed to be good for sore muscles and she got out of bed and went to her closet and opened one of her mother's gift packages.

It was not a hot-water bottle. That had been her mother's euphemism for something her mother couldn't bring herself to discuss. In the package was a douche bag. Jenny's mother knew what they were for, and so did Jenny. She had helped many patients at the hospital use them, though at the hospital they were not much used to prevent pregnancies after love-making; they were used for general feminine hygiene, and in venereal cases. To Jenny Fields a douche bag was a gentler, more commodious version of the Valentine irrigator.

Jenny opened all her mother's packages. In each one was a douche bag. “Please use it, dear!” her mother had begged her. Jenny knew that her mother, though she meant well, assumed that Jenny's sexual activity was considerable and irresponsible. No doubt, as her mother would put it, “since Wellesley.” Since Wellesley, Jenny's mother thought that Jenny was fornicating (as she would also put it) “to beat the band.”

Jenny Fields crawled back to bed with the douche bag filled with hot water and snuggled between her shoulder blades; she hoped the clamps that kept the water from running down the hose would not allow a leak, but to be sure she held the hose in her hands, a little like a rubber rosary, and she dropped the nozzle with the tiny holes into her empty water glass. All night long Jenny lay listening to the douche bag leak.

In this dirty-minded world, she thought, you are either somebody's wife or somebody's whore—or fast on your way to becoming one or the other. If you don't fit either category, then everyone tries to make you think there is something wrong with you. But, she thought, there is nothing wrong with me.

That was the beginning, of course, of the book that many years later would make Jenny Fields famous. However crudely put, her autobiography was said to bridge the usual gap between literary merit and popularity, although Garp claimed that his mother's work had “the same literary merit as the Sears, Roebuck catalog.”

But what made Jenny Fields vulgar? Not her legal brothers, not the man in the movie theater who stained her uniform. Not her mother's douche bags, though these were responsible for Jenny's eventual eviction. Her landlady (a fretful woman who for obscure reasons of her own suspected that every woman was on the verge of an explosion of lasciviousness) discovered that there were nine douche bags in Jenny's tiny room and bath. A matter of guilt by association: in the mind of the troubled landlady, such a sign indicated a fear of contamination beyond even the landlady's fear. Or worse, this profusion of douche bags represented an actual and awesome need for douching, the conceivable reasons for which penetrated the worst of the landlady's dreams.

Whatever she made of the twelve pairs of nursing shoes cannot even be hinted. Jenny thought the matter so absurd—and found her own feelings toward her parents' provisions so ambiguous—that she hardly protested. She moved.

But this did not make her vulgar. Since her brothers, her parents, and her landlady assumed a life of lewdness for her—regardless of her own, private example Jenny decided that all manifestations of her innocence were futile and appeared defensive. She took a small apartment, which prompted a new assault of packaged douche bags from her mother and a stack of nursing shoes from her father. It struck her that they were thinking: If she is to be a whore, let her at least be clean and well shod.

In part, the war kept Jenny from dwelling on how badly her family misread her—and kept her from any bitterness and self-pity, too; Jenny was not a “dweller.” She was a good nurse, and she was increasingly busy. Many nurses were joining up, but Jenny had no desire for a change of uniform, or for travel; she was a solitary girl and she didn't want to have to meet a lot of new people. Also, she found the system of rank irritating enough at Boston Mercy; in an army field hospital, she assumed, it could only be worse.

First of all, she would have missed the babies. That was really why she stayed, when so many were leaving. She was at her best as a nurse, she felt, to mothers and their babies—and there were suddenly so many babies whose fathers were away, or dead or missing; Jenny wanted most of all to encourage these mothers. In fact, she envied them. It was, to her, the ideal situation: a mother alone with a new baby, the husband blown out of the sky over France. A young woman with her own child, with a life ahead of them—just the two of them. A baby with no strings attached, thought Jenny Fields. An almost virgin birth. At least, no future peter treatment would be necessary.

These women, of course, were not always as happy with their lot as Jenny thought she would have been. They were grieving, many of them, or abandoned (many others); they resented their children, some of them; they